Every giving family eventually meets the season this essay is about. The business stumbles, or the drought stretches into a second year, or the diagnosis arrives, and someone at the kitchen table says the sentence that...
Every giving family eventually meets the season this essay is about. The business stumbles, or the drought stretches into a second year, or the diagnosis arrives, and someone at the kitchen table says the sentence that feels so reasonable: "We will pause the giving until things stabilize, and catch up later."
It sounds like prudence. It is usually the first quiet step in a family losing its generosity altogether. Because the pause teaches your household a lesson you never meant to teach: that giving is what we do with surplus. And once giving is filed under surplus, it will spend the rest of its life waiting for a surplus that never quite feels sufficient. Ask anyone who has watched their income triple while their generosity stayed flat.
There is a better rule, and it fits on an index card. When the hard season comes, shrink the gift, never the habit.
Underneath every family's generosity sits one of two operating assumptions, and they produce completely different behavior under pressure.
The first treats giving as a transaction. Money goes out, something comes back: a receipt, a good feeling, standing in the community, perhaps an expected blessing. Transactions are evaluated case by case, so when cash is tight, the transaction is rationally deferred, the way you would defer buying furniture. This is how most households actually operate, whatever their theology says on Sunday.
The second treats giving as identity. We are a family that gives, the way we are a family that tells the truth and a family that prays. Identity is not evaluated case by case. You do not suspend honesty in a hard quarter. When money tightens, an identity-giver asks a different question entirely: not "can we still afford to give?" but "what does our giving look like at this income?" The commitment is fixed; only the expression scales.
Scripture consistently describes the second kind. The Macedonian churches in 2 Corinthians 8 gave "in a severe test of affliction" and "extreme poverty," and Paul says their poverty overflowed in generosity, begging for the privilege of giving. Jesus watched a widow give two small coins and declared she had given more than all the wealthy donors combined, because he was measuring the giver, not the gift. In both stories the amount is almost comically small. The identity is enormous.
Randy Alcorn compresses the stakes into one line: "giving is the only antidote to materialism". Notice the word only. Not budgeting, not contentment seminars, not minimalism. Giving is the sole discipline that breaks money's gravitational pull on a heart, because it is the only one that physically sends money away in love. Which means the family that pauses giving in a hard season has, at the precise moment money anxiety is strongest, set down its only weapon against money anxiety.
Ron Blue tells a story in Generous Living (1997) that has stayed with me for years, about a woman named Ruby who ran a small business that fell apart. Not slightly behind. Thirty-six months behind on its bills. Three full years of obligations stacked up, the kind of hole where every adviser says the same thing: stop all discretionary outflow immediately, and obviously the tithe goes first, since no creditor accepts righteousness as payment.
Ruby refused the obvious. She did not keep giving at the old scale, which would have been presumption dressed as faith, and she did not stop, which would have been fear dressed as prudence. She kept tithing at reduced scale. Smaller amounts, same rhythm, right through the wreckage, while she worked the debt down. The habit never missed a month even when the amount would have embarrassed a proud person.
The business recovered. The bills got paid. And on the far side, Ruby was giving monthly at full scale again, and beyond, because the recovery had somewhere to flow the moment it arrived. That is the detail families miss. The pause-and-catch-up plan almost never catches up, because restarting a stopped habit is a fresh decision that arrives with no momentum, competing against every other claim on newly recovered money. Ruby never needed to restart. Her generosity walked through the valley at reduced rations and came out the other side still marching.
Was the recovery a reward for the tithe? Be careful there; that arithmetic turns God into a slot machine, and plenty of faithful givers have watched businesses die anyway. The honest claim is more modest and more important. Ruby's reduced-scale giving did not buy the recovery. It preserved the giver. Whatever happened to the business, the woman who emerged was still generous, still free of money's terror, still herself. The habit was the thing being saved.
Every farming family on earth already understands this principle; they just have not applied it to giving.
In a famine year, a farming household will eat less, sell assets, endure real hunger. But there is one store the family guards with something close to reverence: the seed stock. Eat the seed and the famine wins permanently, because you have converted next year's harvest into this year's meal. So farmers have starved beside sacks of seed grain. Harsh as it sounds, they understood that some resources are not consumption. They are the future, in storable form.
Your family's giving habit is seed stock. The amount is this year's harvest and it can shrink with the rains. The habit, the fixed monthly act of sending money away in love, is the seed. It carries next season's generosity inside it. A family that gives ten percent in fat years and zero in lean years does not have a giving habit interrupted by hardship; it has a surplus-disposal custom, and its children know the difference even if the parents do not. Children do not inherit our amounts. They inherit our reflexes. The child who watches the family give something in the worst month learns that generosity is who we are. The child who watches giving vanish under pressure learns that generosity is what we do when comfortable, and will replicate exactly that.
And lest anyone think habit-scale giving stays small, look at what stacked habits become. The National Christian Foundation, which exists mainly to help ordinary giving families give, has granted more than 18 billion dollars to churches and charities since 1982. Eighteen billion, assembled overwhelmingly from households that decided generosity was identity and kept the cadence through recessions, dot-com crashes, 2008, and a pandemic. Movements of that size are not built from windfalls. They are built from families who never missed a month.
Now let us make this practical for the households this program serves, because the hard season here is not hypothetical. It has a calendar. School-fees term arrives every January and it arrives like a flood. Drought season stretches the harvest money thinner each week. Sickness lands on a family without insurance and rearranges everything. Add the extended-family obligations that can turn one salary into a small welfare system, and the pause-the-giving reflex is completely understandable.
So here is the protocol. Three rules, agreed in advance, written down before the crisis, because a plan made inside the panic is not a plan.
Rule one: reduce amount, keep cadence. When the hard season hits, the family giving does not stop. It scales. If the tithe was 20,000 shillings a month and the season allows 2,000, then 2,000 goes, on the same date, with the same prayer. The date matters more than the digits. Cadence is the muscle; amount is merely the load, and every athlete knows you lighten the load to protect the training, never the reverse.
Rule two: decide the floor before the flood. Sit down in a calm month and ask: what is the giving that survives our worst realistic month? Name it precisely. It might be a small fixed sum. It might be a percentage of whatever comes in, which scales automatically and never becomes an excuse. Write it into the family's money rules next to rent and fees. When the crisis arrives, there is nothing to debate; the floor was set by the calm version of you, who was wiser.
Rule three: let the form flex, not just the size. In the hardest stretches, the gift may not be money at all, and this is where tier honesty matters. At survival tiers, the faithful gift may be a basin of maize to the neighbor whose season is worse than yours, two hours helping at the church clinic, cooked food carried to the bereaved, presence kept beside the sick. Do not let anyone spiritualize this into second-class giving. The widow's two coins were the smallest gift in the treasury and the largest in the kingdom, on the authority of Jesus himself. A family too broke to give money is never too broke to give, and the household that keeps giving something, in some form, on some rhythm, has kept the seed stock intact. What the protocol forbids is only one thing: the month in which the family gave nothing and called it wisdom.
One more word, specifically about the fees-versus-tithe collision, because it is the most common test. Some households will conclude that in fees term the giving drops to something tiny. Fine. Provision for your children is itself a biblical duty, not a rival to faith. The protocol does not ask you to choose between the tithe and the term. It asks you to refuse the zero.
Here is the assignment, and it should be done this week while no crisis is running, which is exactly why it feels unnecessary.
Set your family's giving floor: the amount or the act that survives the worst month. Discuss it as a household, write it down where the budget lives, and say it in one sentence. "Whatever happens, this family gives at least X, on the first Sunday of every month." Or, at a survival tier: "Whatever happens, this family feeds someone else at least once a month." Let the children hear the sentence. Let them watch it survive a bad season, because one demonstration under pressure will teach them more about money and God than a decade of comfortable tithing.
Then, when the hard season comes, and it will come, you will not stand at the kitchen table renegotiating your family's soul with a calculator. You will already know the answer. Shrink the gift as far as the season demands. The habit is not for sale.
Ruby came out of a thirty-six-month hole still a giver. That is the whole ambition, stated plainly: not that your family will never be poor, but that no season will ever make you someone who does not give. Set the floor. Guard the seed.